1 RAT, 1 PROPHYLACTIC AND 2 BARGES

It’s a funny old thing this going out to the office mularkey. It’s really not like staying at home at all. You see so many sights, so many different things to amuse you and divert you. Suddenly I find myself interacting with the world again instead of shutting myself away from it, and I am starting to find it a bizarre and bewildering place.

Our tiny little office houses the three of us and is but a stone’s throw from a water treatment works which, as we only moved into the place after the “heat” of our last summer had finally ebbed away, has yet to expose us to the fullest extent of any stench that it may (or may not) produce.

I can see the water treatment works every morning as I park my car. It’s just on the other side of the canal which runs alongside the car park. Oh yes, there’s a canal, and if that doesn’t paint you a picture of our rural idyll, then I don’t know what will, and there are plenty of sights for the three of us to see and remark upon as we put the world to rights during our coffee breaks.

So far the office tally is two barges and one rather healthy looking rat.

Oh yes, those and the discarded prophylactic I found lying on the markings of the space where I park my car when I arrived one recent morning.

A used prophylactic.

In a car park.

In an industrial estate.

Whoever he (or – let’s not make any assumptions here - she) is, they sure know how to show someone a good time, and takes them to all the best places, too. After all, what with the canal and all, it might be quite romantic in the moonlight…

I was almost tempted to immortalise this unexpected discovery in verse. Something along the lines of  “Ode to a used prophylactic I found in the car park one autumnal morning” but I decided against it.

It was hard to make it scan and all the rhymes were rather tricky, that and the fact that the subject was rather icky…

Of course, my find did raise some rather interesting questions. After all, there was no real reason to assume that our lonely car park had been selected as the trysting point for some daring young things from the surrounding area. There is always the intriguing possibility that our little office block is actually a nest containing a raging mass of hormones, and might possibly be in all actuality somewhere that could be described as a hotbed of shenanigans...

I mean, present company aside, it’s not that unfeasible to imagine that someone (or, more likely, I imagine sometwo) is, as the more colloquially minded amongst us might put it “at it.”

I mean it’s not totally impossible, is it…? Well, present company excluded, obviously. I try not to be too judgmental, of course, after all, are these urges so very strong that someone can’t even be bothered waiting until they get home? Anyway, it has all led to me giving one or two of the strangers who walk up and down the corridors the odd funny look as they move about the place.

“Was it you…? Or you? Or maybe you…?”

It’s led to one or two sticky moments in the kitchen, I can tell you.

After all, in the past, I have worked in places where people were (apparently) “at it like rabbits” (as the saying goes) and yet I have always been blissfully unaware of such goings and, er… comings…

(Cheap laugh… Sorry…)

I mean, I guess it’s none of my business as long a they keep themselves to themselves and don’t break the photocopier, is it? All I have to do is tread carefully as I tiptoe my way around the car park as it gets dark and slippery (oo-er!) on these coming winter mornings, and, well, it’s not as if it will be there forever. Rubber is, of course, a naturally occurring substance and so I’m sure that it will biodegrade eventually.

Biodegrade… now there’s a word to conjure with… Perhaps that poem might still be on the cards after all, if I get lucky…

(Oops, there I go again…)

Anyway, I hope that it does biodegrade because I’m definitely not picking it up. After all, I don’t know where it’s been and you really should be careful what you pick up in car parks.